Twitter Adds Team Who Created Privacy Tools for Activists

Twitter on Monday announced the acquisition of a two-person startup called Whisper Systems, whose technology protected people’s mobile-phone calls and text messages from being obtained by third parties such as governments.

The deal terms weren’t disclosed. The acquisition led to speculation about what Twitter, an online-messaging service, might do with Whisper Systems founders Moxie Marlinspike and Stuart Anderson–who are well-known in computer security circles–and the technology they built exclusively for devices running on Google’s Android software.

Whisper Systems created a suite of services for human-rights activists or other privacy-conscious individuals, which were used by activists during the recent “Arab spring” actions. In a blog post, Marlinspike and Anderson said the services they created will “live on” though they had to temporarily shut them down.

Twitter acknowledged in a statement that Marlinspike and Anderson will join the company, without providing details. “As part of our fast-growing engineering team, they will be bringing their technology and security expertise to Twitter’s products and services,” the company said.